Now, and even if you didn't had the previous screen, you should have this screen: If you are in an another country than the one in the options, just change it to your appropriate location and keyboard. While being here, check if the time and date are ok. Your next menu should be like the one below. Once validated, you will have an installation screen and you will be prompted to put the other diskettes, like in the picture below: By now, it will be really easy. Just change floppy when told to.
Afficher Installing Ms-DOS part 2 If you are at this stage, it is probably because you successfully passed the first part. Now we are in the harder part of this how to, installing the optional floppy disk.
Run help keystack. If you don't need this, comment out the kstack. You can run option. There are a lot to play with, but I personally like to set the following non-default options:. One handy feature 4DOS provides is the ability to use aliases. If you're familiar with the concept from Linux, it works similarly; if no, it's easiest to see it in action. You should get a directory listing in the same style as the default ls command on Linux. This is a pretty trivial example, but you can use it to provide a number of useful conveniences.
For example, here's my aliases. It isn't necessary to use an alias file, but I find it convenient to keep all alieses grouped together. Another neat, but this time entirely superfluous, trick is to enable support for colored directory listing output.
This is similar to what modern Linux distributions do by default as shown in this simple example if you're not familiar with it , and makes it possible to quickly and easily recognize common file types at a glance. I modeled the following configuration based on Linux's default scheme for dircolors, with a couple differences and pruned down a bit:. There are a couple additional points to be aware of.
The extension list can also be a special type of file, such as dirs directories , hidden hidden files , rdonly read-only files , etc. So, the first item in the line sets my directories blue. The color code is also fairly flexible; as shown above, you can specify both normal colors yel and bright colors bri yel bright colors tend to be easier easier to read against dark backgrounds.
You can also change the character background color: bri blu on yel , for example, will display blue text on a yellow background. You can run the above with the set command to activate, then run dir to test the results. Feel free to customize it a bit, then once you're happy with it you can make it permanent by either adding it to autoexec.
I recommend the latter, as it won't clutter up your environmental variables. For more advanced 4DOS features, refer to the online documentation by running help. Support for modern web standards is quite limited, as should be expected, but basic web browsing should work pretty well.
The name of the browser is Arachne, and it can be obtained from it's home page. After a four year hiatus, it very recently had a new release, so it's good to see that it's still under active development.
Installation is a bit involved, but not too complicated. The largest hurdle is that this requires at least KB of free conventional RAM, and if you installed everything listed in this walkthrough so far, you will almost certainly be under that threshold. Please see the above System Optimization for tips on freeing up enough memory i fnecessary. You'll also want to use a mouse for this, so be sure to follow the mouse driver instructions above to get that setup.
After everything is unpacked, the GUI setup process will start. If you have just barely more over KB free, the installer will exit with a low memory error, as the memory from the unpacker was still in use at the time, pushing you under the threshold.
Set the video options to your preference. Try to go with at least x, higher if possible and you have a reasonably large monitor , but you'll probably be limited by your video card memory. You'll be prompted to set your computer speed profile next; it's probably best to go with Arachne's recommended setting here, as it will do a quick benchmark of your computer first.
Select your preferred option and click Next. You'll then be prompted for some system configuration changes. This is entirely personal preference I prefer to update my files manually after installation, but I do have it create the shortcut batch file for me , so choose what you like and click Next.
Set the max video resolution to the same resolution you selected previously and click Next. Up next is the network configuration. The next page, Arachne Options, can be configured at any time later on to your preferences, so click "Use new settings" to complete setup. You'll be kicked back into DOS at this point, so now would be a good time to make any system config file changes. Consider changing the following in config.
Finally, run arachne. It won't look very pretty, but you should see all of the content in its complete, barely styled glory. Arachne supports a ton of layout options, performance options, etc. To get started, click on the Desktop link in the right navbar or press F10 , then click Options. This is a fairly random collection of utilities I found while researching this project that I consider useful or interesting.
I won't cover them in great detail, but I do recommend checking them out. This is by far the best such utility I've found, is one of the only such utilities that is completely free and not crippled, and is even under reasonably active development. As a bonus, it even can even perform a basic CPU benchmark. If you have any questions about what's in your computer or how it's performing, this is a very worthwhile utility.
Snarf is a simple screenshot utility for DOS. It doesn't support much in the way of options, but it works well in my testing. Screen Thief is another screenshot utility. This one has far more options, but for some reason saves images as pixels wide rather then , which makes everything look stretched horizontally.
That seems to be expected behavior and I can't find a way to fix that, and that's a deal breaker for me. Since this is of somewhat limited practical use I won't spend much time covering the details, but it's a quite nice remote-access solution if that's something you need.
A couple other options that might fit the bill are Remoter and Tiny. Installation and configuration is a bit wonky, so I recommend reading the included ansiplus. It's useful for very old software generally games that run relative to CPU speed. The problem with these games is that they will always run faster as CPU speed increases, so once you reach a certain CPU speed which can be easily hit even with original Pentiums , games become unplayably fast.
There are several utilities that can slow your computer down enough to play these games Mo'Slo probably being the most well known , but my favorite is SLOWDOWN; it's free, has a wealth of features, and is very well documented. After spending a while playing with the system and, most importantly, playing and installing many of my original DOS games, I have a couple few extra tips I wanted to share.
I'm now using the following more conservative settings:. This uses an extra few KB of conventional memory, but has resulted in less random application crashes. Now that I'm using boot menus as described below to re-configure my system as necessary for memory hungry games, I can afford to give up a few KB of RAM here, so the aggressive settings aren't really worth it. SmartDrive is a bit more complicated. I recommend reading the SmartDrive help page for more details, but the short version is that the above command instructs SmartDrive to always use 4 MB of extended memory for cache, use a read-ahead buffer size of 64 KB, use an element size of 8 KB, and disable support for caching CD-ROM drives.
MS-DOS 6. This is handy because it let's you easily change system settings by rebooting and choosing the new configuration rather than modifying config. This generally isn't really needed, but it can be useful on a system with multiple games loaded to easily switch between sometimes configurations needed by each different game, eliminating the need for bootdisks and hand-editing each time you want to play a different game.
The DOS 6. SYS Menu's for Dummies guide explains how boot menus work pretty well, and includes example config. For a much more complicated example probably unnecessarily so , I'm providing my latest config. Few notes about this:. Finally, for the curious, you can also obtain my games. It's fairly basic, but does show how you can prompt for basic user input and take action based on that input from a pure MS-DOS system, so it might be handy as a reference if you're not sure how to do that.
With that I think we're finally! I hope this inspires a few folks to tinker a bit with some of their old hardware, or at least fire up a DOS session under VirtualBox or something, and experience either anew or for the first time the joy of getting MS-DOS configured just right for whatever your needs might be. Breadcrumb Home Tips and Tricks.
That's a very valid question, to which there are a few answers: Setting up a fully working DOS system will give you great appreciation for how far computing has come. For old-timers, it will be a walk down memory lane; for youngsters who've never used nor even seen DOS before, it should be quite an eye-opening experience to experience first hand both how primitive DOS was and yet how capable it could be. DOSBox does an amazing job of supporting DOS games on modern platforms, but for perfect accuracy, including the full memory management experience which can be a game unto itself , a real DOS system can't be beat.
This makes sense as MS-DOS predates the web as we know it today, but I don't want knowledge of this system to be lost to time. I did a significant amount of research for this project, and I want to document and share what I've discovered and re-learned for future reference.
Perhaps most importantly, why not? This project was inspired by a previous project to resurrect my old Packard Bell , my first computer that, not coincidentally, ran MS-DOS 6. Rebuilding and enhancing it from a hardware perspective was a fun experience, and now I'm doing the same from a software perspective.
Prerequisites Old hardware - if it has ISA slots you're probably good to go; anything newer may require some extra work, but it should still be possible to get at least a basic working system installed. Alternatively, you should be able to get this up and running in a virtual machine with VirtualBox or VMware Player , but as with the note about FreeDOS above I'm primarily interested in an authentic experience for this project, which is what's documented here.
If possible, I suggest using or tracking down any original installation media you may have had in my case, I was able to pull the original MS-DOS 6.
If you don't have access to any legit copies and don't want to go the eBay route, you can find a copy online easily enough I recommend the WinWorld Software Library. I don't generally condone piracy, but given this is twenty year old software that's no longer commercially available, I see no harm at all here.
Part of the experience here is the journey itself, so if you get immediately frustrated at any given setback you will not enjoy this project. Basic CLI experience is also expected; I hope to provide enough guidance to get you through this project without the need for too much prior experience , but I have to assume you have at least a basic familiarity with the command line.
Return to top Preparation Relevant Software: RawWrite for Windows - Unless you have physical installation media, you'll need to write the floppy disk images to real diskettes. RawWrite is a simple way to do this in Windows. Set the options for date, time, country and keyboard layout as appropriate, then choose "The settings are correct" to continue.
Press Enter to continue. Obviously, we don't want to repeat this exercise in six months We're talking tiny amounts of space In this article, I leverage newer technology to hybridize this old system.
I use some resources that not everyone may have direct access to. However you should be able to perform a very similar operation using other tools. And maybe even better. Initialize the disk like normal Then set the disk to offline. From within disk management, right-click on the disk entry, and select Offline. See screenshot. So we've downloaded the DOS 6. IMG format. Since we don't want the headache of trying to find three good diskettes, let's convert these into formats that Hyper-V will recognize.
For this, we grab and use the shareware version of WinImage. Install it. Rinse-and-repeat for the other two diskettes. Open up Hyper-V Manager Create a new virtual machine.
Save it wherever you normally would Give it a happy 32MB of memory. It's DOS. It doesn't need much. Now you should be able to see the physical hard disk as an option. Select it Apply that setting. While still in the settings, go to the Diskette Drive, and select Virtual floppy disk. Click OK. Now launch the virtual machine. Follow the install prompts. When prompted, select the next diskette. Installation finishes. The system prompts you to remove the diskettes and reboot. There it is.. DOS loading!
Just be patient. Now at this point, we have a known-good boot sector, we have DOS installed, and all we need are the files to be copied over from that old clunky hard disk. Shut down the virtual Disconnect the SSD from the Hyper-V server, bring it back to our workstation Drag the old drive back out of the freezer and hook it up.
I used Teracopy for this. See references. Shut down the near-dead disk. Stuff it in an anti-static Mylar bag, label it, toss it into the archive vault for posterity. Connect the new SSD, and using Robocopy, compare the contents. This barfed up a logfile of all the differences between the two directories. In these cases, I was most interested in what files were different in size and content. Since the install of MS-Dos was fresh, there are certainly things missing. Follow the setup instructions to install DOS 6.
To insert disks 2 and 3 when setup asks you to, just follow the second direction in this step. Leave comments at the appropriate step about anything you have to say about it.
Use this step to leave comments regarding the entire Instructable. Good luck! Question 2 years ago. Hi, love the tutorial. But now I am stuck with trying to get files onto the virtual hard-drive. I'm on a mac and the PowerISO etc apps to create a floppy drive image only are available for windows machines. Any tips on how to get some files onto the Dos virtualbox from my Mac? Thank you! Answer 9 months ago. Use Storage to put the. What a state of nostalgia that I am in right now. Thank you so much.
Question 2 years ago on Introduction. DOS 6. How do I copy some pre-existing bat files from real hard drive to v drive? I wrote a few applications in Lattice many, many years back and would like to play around with the code, just to see if can work.
Thanks in advance. Great tutorial! Besides the Target drive a Destination drive of equal or larger capacity is needed! Having to create the VHD and VFlop like shown however am I barking up the wrong tree expecting all the drives to be mounted and accessible in the directory after installing the OS? This is great!!!! Thanks a lot! I remember the days I used MS Dos 5 and made several changes to config. Thanks for the information!!!
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